The ideological and intellectual baggage of three fragments of Ukrainian immigrants : a contribution to the history of Ukrainians in Quebec (1910-1960)

The ideological and intellectual baggage of three fragments of Ukrainian immigrants : a contribution to the history of Ukrainians in Quebec (1910-1960)

Title:

The ideological and intellectual baggage of three fragments of Ukrainian immigrants : a contribution to the history of Ukrainians in Quebec (1910-1960)

Kelebay, Yarema Gregory
(1992)
The ideological and intellectual baggage of three fragments of Ukrainian immigrants : a contribution to the history of Ukrainians in Quebec (1910-1960).
PhD thesis, Concordia University.

Abstract

This dissertation is a contribution to the history of Ukrainian immigration to Quebec from 1910 to 1960. It describes this immigration chronologically and deals with its intellectual evolution, which helped shape its institutional structure. Louis Hartz's theory of colonial history attempted to explain phenomena associated with the founding of new societies in the New World. This study adopts the Hartzian approach to ethnic history and describes the historical conditions which pushed three intellectually distinct fragments of Ukrainian immigrants to establish a visible Ukrainian community in Quebec. The first fragment arrived before 1914; the second after World War I and the Russian Revolution; the third after World War II. Using disposition to Marxist thought and the Russian Revolution as a test, the mentalities of the three fragments of Ukrainian immigrants to Quebec are described as first on the left, then in the centre, and finally on the right. The mentality of each fragment led to different initiatives in the community and to the emergence of separate, competing Ukrainian institutional frameworks in Quebec. World War I and the internment of Ukrainians as enemy aliens created a Ukrainian socialist-Communist movement in Quebec during the inter-war years. The second-fragment immigrants who came after 1920 bolstered the anti-socialist group, which split into Catholic and Orthodox factions in 1925 and created a network of competing secular and religious institutions in Quebec before 1939. World War II led to some unity when Ukrainian institutions (except Communist ones) federated in the Ukrainian Canadian Committee (UCC), formed in 1941. After 1945, a third fragment of nationalists arrived with a new mentality, adding to the division and complexity of the Ukrainian community in Quebec. Although the third-fragment refugees were mostly anti-Communist nationalists, the rift in the OUN in 1941 divided them into Melnykites and Banderites. The preponderant majority of those who came to Quebec had sided with Stepan Bandera and were "men of the right." By the time Quebec was on the eve of its "Quiet Revolution" in the early 1960s--a revolution aimed at modernizing the province by making it over into a progressive welfare state--the three successive fragments of Ukrainian immigrants to the province were being guided in the opposite direction